number 34 • Winter 2018

Authors

Nelson W. Polsby

articles

ON A SHELF not far from where I am writing these words sit a half a dozen or so books disparaging Congress and complaining about the congressional role in the constitutional separation of powers. These books date mostly from the late 1940s and the early 1960s, and typically their authors are liberal Democrats. In those years, Congress was unresponsive to liberal Democrats and, naturally enough, aggrieved members of that articulate tribe sought solutions in structural reform.

George Wallace’s rallying cry—“They’s more of us than they is of them”—might well have served as an epigraph for Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority (Arlington House, 1969). The apparent purpose of this weighty volume is to demonstrate that the “research directors, associate professors, social workers, educational consultants, urbanologists, development planners, journalists, brotherhood executives, foundation staffers, communications specialists, culture vendors, pornography merchants, poverty theorists, and so forth”—whom Phillips identifies as the main beneficiaries of the New Deal era—are numerically too few to elect a president in the near future. Moreover, it seems unlikely that even the addition of pointy-headed bureaucrats and intellectual morons would put the Democrats over the top. Thus Phillips reasons that President Nixon should pay no attention to those who argue that he should move leftward in search of a secure Republican majority. The true majority, as Phillips sees it, is already both Republican and conservative, and is likely to become more so in the future.